Page 24 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

High-Impact Government Engagement
Executive Viewpoint A Conversation with DENNIS PAPULA
DENNIS PAPULA
Chief Business Technology Officer, Program Support Center, Department of Health and Human Services
A leader of one of the government’s largest shared- services centers talks about modernizing technology and customer engagement
How is the Program Support
Center using technology to improve engagement?
The Program Support Center (PSC) is a governmentwide shared-services center, and we support every Cabinet-level agency. Our services run the gamut across three portfolios. Real estate logistics
and operations is one, and the second is financial management. In fact, we disperse close to $2 billion a day in grants. The third portfolio is federal occupational health, which, for example, supports over 300 clinics in federal buildings across the country.
Our customers are our colleagues at HHS and at other federal agencies. PSC partners with our customers on everything from digital archiving to negotiating contracts, from financial reporting to storing and distributing medical supplies, and from evaluating employees for their fitness for duty to delivering comprehensive occupational health solutions to federal employees.
We are not a mandatory source for many of those services, especially outside HHS. We always think about how we can provide a commercial experience because, in some cases, we are competing against commercial entities. In addition, people bring their expectations for a commercial customer experience to work. We can’t separate that anymore.
Unfortunately, in government, there’s
a perception that we tend to deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow. One of my jobs is to change that perception. Under the leadership of Director Al Sample, our strategic goals are modernizing technology and improving our partnerships with the customers we serve. Those two drivers are of paramount importance to everything
we do.
What will engagement look like five years from now?
Ideally, the government experience would look like it does in the commercial space. And that means meeting people where they are and allowing them to
use the technology they’re already using. Sometimes there are good reasons why
we can’t do that, but IT organizations
and service providers that don’t have the customer experience as their North Star for modernizing technology and services will find themselves in a very difficult position.
Five years from now, government needs to be more closely matching the commercial world’s flexibility. And
that applies to organizations like PSC that provide shared services and rely on customers choosing us over other options.
What are the most important steps PSC has taken to modernize?
In any kind of IT modernization, we can’t simply lift and shift our current processes to the cloud and expect them to work well. We have to be willing to challenge the way we’ve done business and take the time to understand the customer journey.
It is also important to engage our stakeholders early in the process and use customer-driven management practices every step of the way. We need to move away from the traditional waterfall mindset that we must know all the requirements before we can build anything and instead adopt a more agile approach that has the end-user experience at the heart of how we develop and deploy a system or product. That is a fundamental shift in how we’re approaching modernization and customer engagement.
This interview continues at Carah.io/Papula-HHS.
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